ITicket to RIDE

Rip It Up, Issue 204, 1 August 1994, Page 20

ITicket to RIDE

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What happens to England’s great white pop hopes a few years on? If you’re Ride you look to the past and turn out your strongest album yet. Carnival of Light is just that, sensory overload from a band coming out of their shell. The effects driven fog that surrounded Ride in the past has lifted. And you know right from the opening sounds (a tamboura) that things have changed big time for this Oxford four-piece. Even the cover tells of the new direction inside. Their previous albums, Nowhere and Going Blank Again, were covered by wispy paintings (waves and a vacant face). Carnival's fish-eye photo of the band marks the first time Ride have appeared on any of their releases.

It’s been six years since Ride formed at Banbury Art College. The line up is still drummer Loz Colbert, Steve Queralt on bass, Andy Bell on lead guitar/vocals and frontman Mark Gardener, rhythm guitar, lead vocalist and girl magnet. Mark’s polite about me waking him up to a gloomy Oxford morning (“I had to get up sometime, I guess.”) He’s keen to talk about an album he’s worked on for so long. Carnival of Light is, after all, the first album Ride have really rehearsed at length for. “Well you know, it’s the tricky third album,” he laughs.

“Some of the songs we got together really early,

like the beginning of last year. We all just got back into rehearsing together, kinda like how we started things. We’re trying to spend a lot more time and thought in the recording process, because I think this last album has shown us that that side is getting a lot better. ” By the end of the nine month Going Blank Again world tour, Ride had reached the point of complete exhaustion. The other songwriter in the group, Andy Bell, said it was the most confusing and chaotic time the band had experienced, that everything had gone mad and they needed to run away from it all. “Success started happening really early on for

us and, initially, we just wanted to go with that and make the most of it. But after a while you find you just don’t have any time to get off the trip and get outside and look at it,” says Mark. “You get lost. We’d been friendsick for a while, just touring everywhere and then releasing records. And if we’d kept going, it wouldn’t have done the music any good. We desperately needed to take stock of it all and go away and that’s what we did.”

It was the escape from the band and each other that spawned Carnival. Andy lived between Sweden and America with his wife, Mark took an extended vacation in a remote French Chateaux.

And in his time away he picked up the tamboura, which has since been included in Ride’s repertoire of sounds.

“I got into it last year, purely through going to raves and stuff and hearing these odd sounds that they put in the tracks. I thought it would be nice to get to the roots of one of the sounds. It’s not that difficult to play because it’s only got like four strings and it’s just a drone instrument. I don’t know if I’m any good but I can make this great twangy sound with it.”

That last sentence could almost describe the liquid state that Ride's sound was renowned for. This time round they wanted to be bullied into

shape. They wanted to lose the wallowing walls of fuzz guitar, the misty gloss, they wanted to break out of the shoegazing mould. Enter American producer, George Drakoulias. “Everyone was saying what a strange choice he was, but for me the initial attraction was just feel. For us, it was the first time we’d used proper producers anyway and to my ears George is one of the most happening in America. George was a vibe influence. I mean we didn’t want the album to sound like the Black Crowes or anything, but listening to their album, it was like there was someone with this feeling and vibe behind the band, making them perform well. It was exciting to think of what would happen to our sort of songs and our style if you could get someone like that alongside you.”

But Drakoulias only has a production credit for the song ‘How Does It Feel To Feel’ (a cover of 60s psychedelics the Creation). After two intense weeks, in which he honed Ride’s rhythm section and helped with arrangements (“It helped us gain more focus with him around”), Drak’s commitments with the Dan Penn album clashed. Rather than wait for him to finish, Ride brought in John “Stone Roses” Leckie. And so the trans-Atlantic battle for Ride’s soul began. A soul that, like the Stone Roses, Blur, Suede and Primal Scream, seemed to base itself in the past. Why are the big English indie bands getting their influences off their weedy chests? “I just feel that it’s a process that bands go through to find their own sound. A lot of the bands you just mentioned are really young in terms of records and things. I often think, well, on the first few Stones albums and the first few Beatles albums, half of the songs were covers, you know, they were songs where the band just learnt to play together. I see it as bands becoming aware of what’s gone on before them and referring back to move forward.”

But these days the pressure is on young bands to get the goods out quickly before they disappear. The scene almost dictates that you’re finished by your third or fourth album, and if you’re not finished you’re treated like a pop grandad.” The average age of Ride is 24. “The trouble with the climate here {in England) is that so much is expected of new bands. And it takes a long time for those bands to get any good. Half the problem is that money is thrown at bands before they can even play together, and that’s why the general standard can be quite low.” Did that happen to you? “Well yeah, but we can’t complain about it. When we started we were in college and, sure, we got some jobs briefly after college to keep the band happening, but it really wasn’t long before we were signed and gigging around everywhere. It was like ‘there you go’, there was no preparation

time. We were just students one minute and the next we were suddenly in a band.” And superstardom here we come. “Which was great, it’s what we always wanted. But it does take a while to build up that confidence thing or whatever. Some people seem to have it straight away. But we were pretty hazy up till now."

Are the vocals and guitars on Carnival of Light clearer because you’re more confident about what's in the songs? “Definitely. I mean that’s the sort of thing I was saying about how the band has developed. I think you can trace that from our first record until now. I think the most important thing about this record was to bring out the music and bring out the vocals, which we did a lot more work on.”

And how about you, you’re the frontman of the

band, the focus of the photo shoots. How has all the attention affected you? “Well”, says Mark , choosing his words with a laugh, “I think it’s great, really.” “I suppose it does affect me because, you know, people know you, they know your face. But I think, well, I’m 24 and, well, great, really. I’m not going to argue with it. It’s not going to be there forever, I guess. It hasn’t gone to my head, I think my girlfriend keeps me in line as far as that goes.” If the lyrics from ‘Leave Them All Behind’ summed up Ride in 92 (“We’ve got so far to go, until we get there just let it flow") then it’s the words of ‘Only Now’ that tell us where Ride are at in 94 (“Early on the gem not clear/comes the time to take a turn, to find another way”). Mark cowrote ‘Only Now’ with Jack Rieley, an old Beach Boys manager who hasn’t been heard of since the early 70s. Rieley wrote the lyrics for Beach Boys albums like Surf’s Up, Carl and the Passions and Holland.

“It was kind of weird how it all happened. Like the first music I ever listened to was the Beach Boys at an early age. And that made a big impres-

sion — they were always there for me, and I’ve always loved them. “John Leckie used to bring in all these CDs that he thought we’d like to hear, and he brought in Holland and I was like ‘weird, this is one of my favourite ever albums’, and he said he knew Jack Rieley. It was like something was telling me to make a connection. I had the music to ‘Only Now’ and I hadn’t really sorted out any words. “Everything else had been done on the album and I wanted to make the last song something special, you know. So during mixing time I flew to Paris, met Jack, spent a night drinking and talking and swapping stories and the following day we went through the song. Sometimes you can just get too close to things and try and do it all, but when you get someone like that alongside you, you learn so much and I think it’s made that song

“Half the problem is that money is thrown at bands before they can even play together, and that’s why the general standard can be quite low.”

really special.” Something special. Something different. That was Ride’s aim with this album. In order to get what they wanted they used six different studios, from Abbey Road to the isolated Sawmills studio in Cornwall.

“I think the jumping around kept things more fresh because you didn’t just mould yourself into one environment. We started in Cornwall, which was John Leckie’s choice. The studio was on the side of an estuary and you can only get to it by boat when the tide is in. When we got there in the evening it felt like Apocalypse Now, we’re in this small little boat and this guy was taking us in and it was like ‘l’m sure there are some gooks out there waiting to ambush us’. “That was a good place to start the album, it’s just so far out, tracks like ‘Moonlight Medicine’ came together there and they wouldn’t have sounded like they did if they were recorded anywhere else.”

You used Jon Lord from Deep Purple on that track didn’t you? “Yeah. Jon Lord came about basically through a

social connection. I know the daughter of a friend of his really well and I thought why not get him in on it. When I first started smoking pot, when I was 16,1 used to listen to a lot of Deep Purple, so I’ve always had a real soft spot for them. And out of Deep Purple I think Jon Lord is a total musical wizard on the Hammond.”

There were two types of Ride songs in the past, the eight-minute epics like ‘Today Forever’ and the three-minute pop bursts like ‘Twisterella’. But apart from ‘Birdman’, the only typical Ride epic, the rest of Carnival’s tracks have developed out of a new found simplicity. Basic structures, basic chords and melody lines designed to glide into your ears and hit you like three day old chilli. The band members themselves seem to have gone through the changes together, as a unit. “Yeah definitely. Ride is a unit. I think that’s a positive thing. Because everyone recognises that something special happens when we get together and play and that’s the Ride thing, I guess. That’s the thing that makes you feel good, which is the reason we’re doing it.” There’s a unifying feel lyrically as well. The tracks ‘Moonlight Medicine’, ‘Natural Grace’, Endless Road’ and ‘Birdman’ all mention flying away to the sky or the sun, there’s your song ‘IOOO Miles’ and on Andy’s ‘Crown of Creation’ he writes “I’ve been running for 1000 miles”. “I think we feed off each other. If Andy does something then I respond to that and vice versa. I think that’s why it works out so housey. We do things together and discuss songs. It stops the whole thing becoming one man’s vision, which we were always worried about it becoming. I think that makes the album a lot more varied because it’s coming from different sources.” One source Ride are hoping won’t be a big influence on the next album is touring. They’ve said they almost hope Carnival isn’t a success so they don’t have to embark on a massive world tour all over again. “The last one really wore us down to a point where it took so long to recover and get creative again. We all really want to carry on with the recording thing for a bit more and stretch it into another album and then do a big tour. We felt almost sad when we finished this record because we felt that really good things were happening in the studio. I think everyone would go a little bit crazy if we felt it was going to be another two years before we could do this again, so we want to keep a balance.” So where are you at, with Carnival of Light out of your system? “I think we’ve just done our Sgt Peppers and we’re now looking on to do our Abbey Rd, that’s how I see it.”

JOHN TAITE